Reduction-assisted Fault Localization: Don’t Throw Away the By-products!

Dániel Vince, Renáta Hodován, Ákos Kiss

2021

Abstract

Spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) is a popular idea for automated software debugging. SBFL techniques use information about the execution of program elements, recorded on a suite of test cases, and derive statistics from them, which are then used to determine the suspiciousness of program elements, thus guiding the debugging efforts. However, even the best techniques can face problems when the statistics are unbalanced. If only one test case causes a program failure and all other inputs execute correctly, as is typical for fuzz testing, then it may be hard to differentiate between the program elements suspiciousness-wise. In this paper, we propose to utilize test case reduction, a technique to minimize unnecessarily large test cases often generated with fuzzing, to assist SBFL in such scenarios. As the intermediate results, or by-products, of the reduction are additional test cases to the program, we use these by-products when applying SBFL. We have evaluated this idea, and our results show that it can help SBFL precision by up to 49% on a real-world use-case.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Vince D., Hodován R. and Kiss Á. (2021). Reduction-assisted Fault Localization: Don’t Throw Away the By-products!. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-989-758-523-4, pages 196-206. DOI: 10.5220/0010560501960206

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft21,
author={Dániel Vince and Renáta Hodován and Ákos Kiss},
title={Reduction-assisted Fault Localization: Don’t Throw Away the By-products!},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,},
year={2021},
pages={196-206},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010560501960206},
isbn={978-989-758-523-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,
TI - Reduction-assisted Fault Localization: Don’t Throw Away the By-products!
SN - 978-989-758-523-4
AU - Vince D.
AU - Hodován R.
AU - Kiss Á.
PY - 2021
SP - 196
EP - 206
DO - 10.5220/0010560501960206